While working on this week's Bruckner column, I consulted John Williamson's Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, Julian Horton's Bruckner's Symphonies, and Benjamin Korstvedt's excellent short book on the Eighth Symphony, as well as classic older work by Robert Simpson and Deryck Cooke (some of whose conclusions no longer hold up). Korstvedt lucidly summarized the drift of modern Bruckner scholarship in a recent article for the New York Times. Dermot Gault's The New Bruckner, published last year by Ashgate, arrived as my article went to press, and I've been looking through it this week. Like Korstvedt, Gault questions the image of Bruckner as a naïve soul who let himself be bossed around by musical colleagues. The composer's unending work of revision, far from being a display of insecurity, was in fact integral to his development of new ideas of symphonic form. Gault also has a good section on the Finale of the Ninth Symphony, which he calls a "damaged fresco" — an excellent metaphor for the music that remains.

In an analysis of the Bruckner cult during the Third Reich, Gault defends the composer from the suspicion that he was any sort of extreme nationalist or fascist-in-the-making. Yet I wonder if Gault is a little too quick to separate Bruckner from anti-Semitic feeling. It's true that the most severe remark Bruckner made on the subject of the Jews seems to have been a question he posed to a Jewish student: "Tell me, do you really think that the Messiah has not come?" Not exactly Georg von Schönerer. Yet Margaret Notley, in a 2006 essay for 19th Century Music, points out that in 1891 Bruckner wrote a letter to the music critic Hans Puchstein thanking him for his "brilliant, splendid article” on the Third Symphony. As it happens, Puchstein's piece appeared on the front page of the notorious anti-Semitic paper Deutsches Volksblatt, in the company of a rant against the Rothschilds. Immediately below the review was a slogan in boldface: “Kauft nur bei Christen!” ("Buy only from Christians!"). So Bruckner could hardly have been unaware of the political leanings of some of his most vociferous fans.

There is certainly a nationalist strain in Bruckner's choral-orchestral setting Helgoland, his final completed piece. But the Ninth is something else again: a work resistant to affirmation, tilting toward tortured interior regions. Ludwig Wittgenstein was a Bruckner fan, and in the writings collected in Culture and Value he makes the fascinating, surprising observation that Bruckner's Ninth seems "a sort of protest against Beethoven's," comparing it to Lenau's Faust versus Goethe's. (The remark, from 1938, uncannily anticipates Thomas Mann's famous phraseabout "taking back" the Ninth, in Doctor Faustus.) Two years before his death, Bruckner wrote in his diary, “Is that which Faith calls the immortal soul of man only an organic reaction of the brain?” What we know of the Ninth's Finale suggests that Bruckner was planning no simple, triumphal answers to such questions. Faith would have won out in the end, but not without an enormous struggle, bordering on madness. At the end of his life, Bruckner was seen reciting the Lord's Prayer at the top of his voice, repeating each line for emphasis. He is also said to have suggested that if he did not live to finish the Ninth then God would have only Himself to blame.

Next week I will make a brief trip to Brasil for the publication of Escuta só, or Listen to This. On August 4th, at 7:30PM, I will give my "Chacona, Lamento" lecture at the splendid Sala São Paulo. (Details here.) On August 6th, at 6PM, I will speak at the Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio, on Avenida Marquês de São Vicente. (Go here for the Institute's online tribute to Pixinguinha.) Both events are part of a series of lectures celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of my Brazilian publisher, Companhia das Letras.

In this week's New Yorker I have a column about Prof. Dr. Anton Bruckner, on the occasion of the Cleveland Orchestra's Bruckner festival at Lincoln Center. The orchestra has DVD recordings of the four symphonies it played in the series: the Fifth, the Seventh, the Eighth (in the 1887 version), and the Ninth. I've heard only the last two; both are recommendable, the first for giving the best account to date of the original version of the symphony, the second for the sustained brilliance of the playing. Off the top of my head, here are a few other favorite Bruckner recordings: the Ninth, with Giulini and the Vienna Philharmonic (DG); the Eighth, with Boulez and the Vienna (DG); Furtwängler's vehement wartime Fifth with the Berlin Philharmonic (Music & Arts); the Fourth, with Jochum and the Berliners (DG); the Sixth, with Klemperer and the New Philharmonia (EMI); Haitink's fine new Chicago recording of the Seventh (Resound); Norrington's bracing, unconventional view of the Third (EMI); and the Mass No. 3, with Herreweghe (Harmonia Mundi). I'm also very fond of Horenstein's late-period live recordings of the Eighth and the Ninth from the BBC. (Horenstein's Vox Ninth was my first record.) When I was younger, I immersed myself in Karajan's Bruckner; for whatever reason, I found those recordings much less satisfying when I recently returned to them. I have yet to find my way into the cult of Celibidache, despite various efforts. As for the various completions of the Ninth, discussed briefly at the end of the column, I'll say more in a future post. For the moment, I can hardly improve on Richard Lehnert's comprehensive coverage of the subject in Stereophile. By the way, you can watch a weird dance piece based on the Ninth finale, although it will not be suitable for the more puritanical American workplaces. Don't worry — the hip-hop heard at the outset is not part of the score.

One can only assume that total global economic collapse isn't imminent if Angela Merkel felt free to enjoy a full day of Wagner at the opening of the Bayreuth Festival. Or perhaps she loves her Wagner a little too much? ("No, Mr. President, you can't check in with Merkel, it's the middle of Act II.") In any case, here she is at the end of the second intermission of Tannhäuser, with brass players delivering the traditional take-your-seats signal.

The other night, in the company of Seated Ovation, I ventured through suffocating heat to Bargemusic, under the Brooklyn Bridge, where Blair McMillen played Triadic Memories, Morton Feldman's biggest and perhaps most beautiful work for piano. The concert was up against not only hostile weather conditions but also an outdoor showing of Sweet Smell of Success in the gorgeous new Brooklyn Bridge Park. (Having lived in Brooklyn Heights for much of the nineties, I'm amazed by the transformation of what used to be a grim, empty pier complex.) Nonetheless, a hardy band of Feldmanites came out to hear McMillen, and it was very much worth a trip through the outdoor oven. On our way, we passed the former site of 7 Middagh Street, the Britten-Pears-Auden hideout, and Will (Seated Ovation) informed me that Gabriel Kahane has made the house the subject of a musical, which the Public will produce next spring. I had somehow overlooked this crucial fact. I used to be able to see the ghost of the house from my window.

I've caught only one other live rendition of Triadic Memories, by the legendary new-music pianist Aki Takahashi, at the 1996 Lincoln Center Festival. (Let's take a moment to acknowledge the remarkable programs that John Rockwell presented that summer.) Feldman's later piano music took inspiration from Takahashi's miraculously translucent tone, which vaguely resembles that of Radu Lupu. McMillen, too, draws softly glowing pianissimos from his instrument, and in the opening bars (see above) he brings out more of a rhythmic lilt than do most of his recorded predecessors — almost a jazzy bounce. He has an acute feeling for those remarkable passages in which Feldman strips everything down to a unison line (B, D-flat, A-sharp, D-natural, spaced out over two octaves) or even to bell-like soundings of single notes (C# twice, E-flat three times, C-natural four times, D five times). And McMillen applies just the right amount of pedal, so that the music is enveloped in a slight mist while remaining crystalline. I hope he has a chance to record the piece: his view is one that I'd like to have in my library, alongside Takahashi's account and cosmically spacious readings by John Tilbury and Marilyn Nonken. Chris Villars's Feldman site presently lists more than a dozen recordings.

The experience of hearing Feldman waterborne adds unexpected layers of extra-musical or semi-musical meaning. (It's not the first time: there was a Bargemusic Feldman series last year, which Steve Smith attended.) Something about the gently irregular rhythms of Triadic Memories matched the pulsation of the waves. And the music lent a novel emotional timbre to the familiar backdrop of downtown Manhattan lights and East River traffic. One by one the boats went by — water taxis, speedboats, party-central paddle steamers, “Spirit Cruises,” a huge vessel with the curious name Cornucopia Majesty — and Feldman marked each one of them with an air of ineffable sadness, as if they were all sailing smoothly into oblivion.

The Alaska-born violist Eliesha Nelson, who plays in the Cleveland Orchestra, has a new CD entitled Russian Viola Sonatas, with Glen Inanga at the piano. I rubbed my eyes somewhat when I studied the tracklist and discovered not only that the Shostakovich sonata was not there but that the composers included — Varvara Gaigerova, Alexander Winkler, and Paul Juon — were entirely new to me. The Gaigerova Suite Op. 8, the beginning of which you can hear in the video preview above, is particularly striking — a Scriabinesque score in four brief, pungent movements. Relatively little is known of the composer, who had a short life, dying in 1944 at the age of forty. (I can find no information about how she died.) She studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Neuhaus, Catoire, and Miaskovsky, and later played piano at the Bolshoi Theater. She had a strong interest in the ethnic musical traditions of the Soviet Union and wrote a symphony on Kalmyk themes. From this posting on Bob Shingleton's Overgrown Path I suspect that the conductor John McLaughlin Williams, an avid sleuth of unsung composers, had something to do with bringing Gaigerova's music further to light. The CD is beautifully played throughout; Nelson's tone is strikingly rich and warm.

Footnote: Thanks to John Luther Adams I am able to say that I have actually been to Nelson's hometown of North Pole, Alaska (see last photo in this post).

In the August issue ofOpera News, William Braun interviews Andrew Porter, my immensely distinguished New Yorker predecessor, whom many people would consider the greatest music critic alive. (I certainly endorse that proposition.) The interview isn't yet online, but here is a choice excerpt:

BRAUN: With all of the hundreds of people you've reviewed, has anyone ever taken great umbrage? Has anyone ever come after you?

PORTER: I gave offense to Colin Graham once by saying there were cheap touches in his Coronation of Poppea, which he did at the ENO. It was just a disagreement, really, that's all. But there's someone who looks rather like me who was attacked in the lobby of La Scala, thrown to the floor and kicked. I was thought to have been unappreciative of the prima donna Leyla Gencer. People were yelling, 'How could you say what you said about our Leyla Gencer!' And the poor man was crying, "I'm not Andrew Porter! I'm not Andrew Porter!"

Alvin Curran: Live in Roma is the title of a new book from the Milanese record label and publishing house Die Schachtel, which gives attention to the Italian and American avant-gardes. (Forced Exposure distributes it in the U.S.) When I was in Rome last month, I was happy to meet Curran, with whom I'd exchanged numerous e-mails over the years. The composer has been in Rome for nearly five decades, and now lives with his wife, Susan Levenstein, in an apartment with a spectacular view of the Colosseum. The Schachtel book has, among other things, an absorbing long conversation between Curran and David Bernstein, who teaches at Mills College and edited the recent history about the San Francisco Tape Music Center. In one passage, Curran wonderfully evokes the atmosphere of Rome in the mid-1960s:

There were characters left and right; it was like some unwritten children's book that I myself was part of; and every time I turned a page I'd meet a new character. And they weren't just "any" characters. Right off the bat I met Fellini; I met Antonioni, Bertulucci, I met these characters, some were famous, some were known, some were unknown; I met a lot of great people at that time such as Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theater, and Robert Wilson, who suddenly showed up out of nowhere and did Deaf Man Glance. I mean this place was jumping. Giuseppe Chiari, my god, there's a guy, a genius; he died very recently, I consider him one of my main teachers. He was the heart and soul of Fluxus and beyond and largely unrecognized in the music world, but a darling of the art world and internationally.

Nam June Paik is suddenly here in Rome with Charlotte Moorman at the Feltrinelli bookstore, and she's immersed in an oil drum full of water with propellers on her breasts. I'm mixing up a couple of years—basically it's 1965-67—that I'm compressing into this memory lane. Earle Brown shows up; Morty Feldman is here; Elliott Carter, Barbara Mayfield, and Allan Bryant, a very interesting person, who already in the very first days of MEV [the pioneering electronic improvisation group Musica Elettronica Viva], was constructing these amazing stringed instruments; everyone was making stringed instruments, but he was making stringed instruments not just with metal strings, like guitars with weird tunings. He was making them out of rubber bands and using motor propellers to play them. I'm telling you, I'm just dropping, like, about an eighth of all of the stuff that was going on. Can you imagine? The Living Theater, and all this was happening, not just like a fairytale, but like a children's storybook that's preparing you for a revolution, and I didn't know that. I felt something in the air and so did everybody else; but had no idea what.

Curran is insufficiently celebrated both in his native America and in his adopted homeland. Above is a video of a recent work, Oh Brass on the Grass Alas — a play, of course, on Gertrude Stein's famous line for Virgil Thomson, "Pigeons on the grass alas." It was first staged at the Donaueschingen Festival in 2006; Curran wrote about it for the New York Times's fantastic Score blog. This is perhaps something for Make Music NY to take a look at! Curran's well-stocked website is here.

The attached video shows Riccardo Muti's remarkable speech [see 7:30] after "Va, pensiero" at a Rome Opera performance of Nabucco in March. The crucial passage may be translated thus: "When the chorus sang ‘Oh mia patria sì bella e perduta!’ [Oh, my country so beautiful and lost!] I thought to myself that if we slay the culture on which the history of Italy is founded, truly our country will be beautiful and lost."

Tomorrow, the Lincoln Center Festival, which has been very strong on music this year, will present Merce Fair, a daylong tribute to the late Merce Cunningham in various spaces at the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex. Needless to say, the music of John Cage and allied composers will figure strongly in the proceedings, which go from ten in the morning until ten at night. (On the page linked above, you can download a handy pdf of the complete schedule.) Starting at 3:50PM, the spectacular Allen Room will be the scene of a series of Musicians' Concerts, with work of John King, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, and, of course, Cage himself. Selections from Cunningham and Cage's manuscripts will be on display on the fifth floor of Jazz at Lincoln Center, courtesy of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Sedgwick Clark, the editor of the Musical AmericaInternational Directory of the Performing Arts, is among the most experienced and knowledgeable concertgoers I know. If you ask him about, say, great performances of Mahler's Fifth he's heard over the years, he will cite Solti with the Chicago and Bernstein with Vienna, and then trump you by mentioning a Sergiu Comissiona / Baltimore Symphony account he heard in 1975. So I'm proud to say that for the second year in a row Sedge and I have been in perfect agreement about what was the most remarkable concert of the regular season. Last season, it was the Minnesota Orchestra playing Sibelius's Kullervo (Sedge's blog post here, my review here); this season, it was the Oregon Symphony's stunning war program at Spring for Music.

David Michalek's latest slow-motion photographic work, Portraits in Dramatic Time, is now playing on Lincoln Center Plaza. There is an optional soundscape by Du Yun. Bruckner might also be an appropriate choice.

With bad news billowing all over, let's note a few tendrils of the good. The San Francisco Opera, which has been going through a spell of deep worry (see a recent Joshua Kosman piece), had a big success with its Ring cycle. The show effectively sold out, generating $7,236,673 in box-office income.... Also, the consistently adventurous Minnesota Opera balanced its budget for the ninth season in a row, playing to 92% capacity. This record is especially noteworthy given Minnesota's history of championing new works and offbeat repertory; they offered Bernard Herrmann's Wuthering Heights this season. Yes, AGMA's Alan Gordon, you can do well at the box office without putting on Traviata and Carmen round the clock, as City Opera's own history amply shows.... What might have been (but probably couldn't) in NYC: Zachary Woolfe visits Gerard Mortier in Madrid and sees his presentation of Messiaen's St. Francis, which opened the 2009 City Opera season in a fantasy parallel universe.... Just recently I was wandering Venice's canals looking for the sites of theaters where Francesco Cavalli's operas played. Tonight and Saturday night, the Vertical Player Repertory completes its run of Cavalli's Calisto by the side of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, slightly less historic but no less pungent. John Yohalem reviews the show at Parterre.

Will Crutchfield's long-running Bel Canto series at the Caramoor Festival, north of New York, had another happy outing last weekend with Guillaume Tell, Rossini's operatic valediction. (There is one more performance on Friday.) The cast wasn't flawless, but I'm not sure who'd be able to field a flawless cast in Tell these days. Michael Spyres certainly did not embarrass himself in the semi-impossible tenor role of Arnold, even if he struggled with the extreme upper register at times, and Daniel Mobbs supplied a steady center of gravity in the title role. The stars were the women: Julianna Di Giacomo, rich-voiced if a little uncontrolled as Mathilde; Talise Trevigne, glitteringly precise as Jemmy; and Vanessa Cariddi, displaying a smoky lower register in the mezzo role of Hedwige. Their Act IV trio was the vocal highlight of the night. Crutchfield conducted splendidly, generating palpable energy in the St. Luke's Orchestra. I also attended an afternoon seminar-concert with Crutchfield, the great Italian-opera scholar Philip Gossett (at the piano above), and young artists from the Caramoor program, in which we got to hear several numbers that Crutchfield elected to omit from the main presentation. (Charlotte Dobbs, whom I last heard singing The Book of the Hanging Gardens with Mitsuko Uchida at Marlboro, was especially fine in Jemmy's "Ah! que ton âme se rassure.") Gossett emphasized how the reputation of Tell was long distorted by its Italian-language version, which amounted to a political bowdlerization, with references to "liberty" and "tyrants" omitted. (When Muti conducted Tell in Italian at La Scala, Gossett insisted that he use an amended libretto. The Met, alas, ignores Gossett's work.) Gossett also spoke eloquently of the power of the ending — that slow finale that soars through a wide harmonic space, C major to A minor to F major to D minor to B-flat major to G minor to E-flat major, evoking the "horizon immense" of human possibility. That Rossini should have stopped composing opera after writing such a finale is shocking: it feels like the birth of a new world. These few minutes are in themselves worth the trip to Katonah.